Current views on psychoanalytic technique

American psychoanalysis faces a period of conceptual upheaval that casts critical doubt on every technique and belief. While promises of conceptual clarity and clinical leverage, as well as potential reconciliation within the fractured psychoanalytic community energizes us, at the same time, many are shaken to our theoretical roots. These dramatic changes result from the shift in American psychoanalysis from a one-person to a two-person model, simple words which portend a transformation of exponential proportions. By analogy, a change of several degrees in temperature may go unnoticed unless occurring at the point at which there is a change of state. Ice turned into water is capable of entirely new effect and influence. We may be witnessing the end of the psychoanalytic ice age, the melting of rock-hard theory, which has dominated analytic thought for the past century.

Adopting the two-person model forces rethinking virtually every aspect of theory and technique. The field of inquiry, the nature of analytic data, and the conception of the clinical situation are changed. Not only are old answers out of date, but the old questions no longer apply. I will describe certain of the problems raised by the new model and the solution offered by Interpersonal psychoanalytic theory.

Interpersonalists start with the assumption that all facets of human life are intrinsically shaped by experience with other people. Just as language gives shape and meaning to otherwise inchoate thought, relational life is the medium through which people access both internal and external realities. Intrapsychic experience is not dismissed by Interpersonal theorists, but it is reconceived. There simply is no private event, no drive or impulse, no stirring of hunger, or lust, or curiosity, and certainly no image or fantasy, which is not filtered through the many layers and textures of interactive experience.

Earlier I used the image of melting ice to convey the dawning recognition that both participants